Use your brain to change your age by Daniel G.amen

1 NANA, LISA, AND RUTH KNOW YOUR NUMBERS TO KEEP YOUR MIND HEALTHY AND PREVENT ALZHEIMER’S AND OTHER DISEASES OF AGING I can never find my keys. Sometimes they show up by the eggs in the refrigerator. I am fifty-two. Isn’t that normal? Think again! hen Lisa was a young girl she adored her nana, her mother’s mother. Nana and Lisa baked cookies together, played cards for hours, told silly jokes, and picked plums in Nana’s back- yard. Nana taught Lisa how to can the fruit for plum jam, which they loved to share. Nana was very overweight, so she would hold the ladder while her granddaughter climbed the ladder for the plums. On nights Lisa slept over, Nana always read to her. Lisa remembers laughing so hard that she would sometimes snort at the silly voices Nana used when she read the stories.At night in the dark they promised each other to al-ways be best friends. Lisa loved snuggling into Nana’s body, which was ever so soft. She felt unconditional love in Nana’s presence, which was one of the best feelings she remembered from her childhood. Then, when Lisa was about twelve years old, something started to change. At first, it was barely noticeable. Nana seemed less interested in their time together. There were no more jokes, fewer stories, and Nana 29 30 Daniel G. Amen said she was too tired to play games or pick plums. Nana was also more irritable with Lisa, even sometimes yelling at her for what seemed like no reason at all. Lisa was devastated, but Nana did not pick up on the social cues that should have told her that her granddaughter needed soothing. Lisa remembers this as one of the saddest, most confusing times in her life. She wondered if she had done something to make Nana mad. “What’s wrong with Nana?” Lisa would ask her mother, but time and again her mother would say,“Don’t worry. Nana is fi ne.” This only deepened Lisa’s pain and confusion. Maybe she really was the problem and Nana had just stopped loving her. Her grandmother was sixty- five years old when Lisa noticed the changes.Around this time, Nana had been diagnosed with diabetes and high blood pressure. Lisa remembered watching Nana take her pills and her shots to feel better, but no one seemed overly concerned about her health. When Lisa was fourteen, Nana took a dramatic turn for the worse. With Lisa in the car, Nana got lost on the way home from the store. Nana panicked and stopped a man who was walking across the street to ask for help, but she could not tell him where she lived. She appeared frightened and confused, like a child. Lisa asked the man to call her grandfather, who came to pick them up. Once they got home Lisa cornered her mother.“Look, Mom, I know something is really wrong with Nana. Her brain isn’t working right. She needs help.” Still, the family continued making excuses, normalizing what was obviously not normal behavior. Looking back on this time, as an adult, Lisa remembers being furious, feeling she was, even as a young teen, the lone voice of reason shouting into a bitter wind. After Nana got lost several more times, the family finally was concerned enough to take her to a doctor who diagnosed her with something called senile dementia. He recommended Nana live in a nursing home for people with memory problems. Gone were the happy warm feelings she once enjoyed when she Use Your Brain to Change Your Age 31 visited her grandmother. The nursing home where she now lived smelled “medical” and felt cold, and Lisa felt odd and afraid in it. She never knew which Nana she’d find on these visits: Sometimes Nana smiled when she saw Lisa; sometimes she did not recognize her at all. Sometimes when Lisa read to Nana she seemed engaged and happy, other times her grandmother just wanted to be left alone. After a few years, Nana died in the nursing home. However, Lisa felt that Nana had really died years earlier when her personality slowly ebbed away. At Nana’s funeral, all of their special times circled through Lisa’s mind. She couldn’t help wondering how a person could disappear while her body continued living on, and she couldn’t help feeling how sad it all was. Lisa wondered if she or her mother would have the same problem as Nana. She prayed to God they would not. Lisa’s mother, Ruth, was also a lot of fun. They too had many spe-cial times, cooking, reading, and playing together. Like Nana, Ruth was a fabulous baker who also struggled with her weight, early onset diabe-tes, and hypertension. Lisa’s mother was also a wonderful grandmother to Lisa’s three daughters, which reminded Lisa of the closeness she’d shared with her own nana. In fact, her girls called her mother Nana as well. In the back of her mind she kept watch over her own mother’s brain health. She didn’t want her granddaughters to lose this vibrant and wonderful relationship they’d enjoyed with her mom, as she’d lost hers with Nana. It was this concern that prompted Lisa, now in her early forties, to pick up my book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. When Ruth turned sixty-eight Lisa’s worst fears started to actualize. At first, Ruth struggled with finding the right words. If she meant dog, she might unintentionally say bark; if she meant milk, she sometimes said cow. One time when she asked her granddaughter for a hug, she said,“Give Nana a slap.” Ruth’s memory was also becoming a problem. Lisa watched her reach for the phone to dial her sister whom she’d just called fiveminutes earlier. Her sister said this sort of thing was happening more frequently. ... - tailieumienphi.vn